The words “Free Palestine” were followed by fire—an attack with three Molotov cocktails.
The attack in June on a group of Jews marching in Boulder, Colorado, for the Israeli hostages left one older Jewish woman dead and several other marchers injured. When the police investigated Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who carried out the attack, they found that he had been influenced online by the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That determination spurred Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to reintroduce legislation to brand the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, legislation that had been in the works on and off since 2014. That legislation is still making its way through Congress.
But in late November, President Trump also took action. He issued an executive order setting in motion a process by which the executive branch would make a determination about branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and decide whether they were terrorist organizations.
The executive order specifically mentions the Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan as ones that have called for violence, though it does not immediately designate them terrorist groups.
Trump’s order left some of his supporters unhappy, because it fails to simply say that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.
In contrast, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida went ahead and issued rules designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an American organization that has been tied to the Brotherhood—as foreign terrorist organizations. CAIR is suing both states in court.
Around the world, only one Western country, Austria, has designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The other countries that have done so are all Arab or Muslim countries, which generally have lower thresholds and standards of evidence to make such declarations.
What the divide between the White House and Texas and Florida hints at is that dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood is a bit more complicated than dealing with other international Islamist organizations. The groups affiliated with the Brotherhood extend to clearly recognized terrorist groups like Hamas, but they also include a political party that was a coalition partner in Israel’s government. That leaves the US government with a dilemma.

A Brotherhood Around the World
The Muslim Brotherhood dates back to 1928, when it was founded by a schoolteacher and imam named Hassan al-Banna. In the aftermath of Ottoman rule, Egypt was under the influence of the British, though there was an independent Egyptian government, which demanded that the country be secularized.
Al-Banna was of the opinion that Islam should be the bedrock and basis of all of society’s institutions, not merely a religion in a secularized country, and he created the Muslim Brotherhood to promote that “from below,” meaning as a grassroots organization that would overwhelm society. The organization established hundreds of social institutions, like schools, mosques and health clinics, throughout Egypt.
But Al-Banna also espoused violence as a proper way of spreading Muslim doctrine, and a military wing of the organization began carrying out attacks, including political assassinations, in Egypt during the 1940s. The organization also sent volunteers to attack Israel in 1948.
The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed in Egypt in 1948 because the government felt that it was a threat, possibly a violent one, to its rule. Al-Banna was killed on the street in 1949, and his followers claimed that it was an assassination by the government.
The Brotherhood would continue to be oppressed in Egypt after the 1952 revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Nasser was nearly assassinated in 1954 by what was suspected to be a Brotherhood plot, and that led to many of the Brotherhood leaders being imprisoned or executed.
One who would go on to have outsized influence was Sayyid Qutb, whose writings in prison would influence Sunni radicals and terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Qutb was eventually executed in 1966, but his writings lived on.
While that kind of extreme radicalism was an offshoot of the Brotherhood, the general mass of the Brotherhood took a different route during the 1980s, founding political opposition groups in many countries that often ran in elections, including in Syria and Jordan.
There were still openly violent groups that were part of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hamas, which was officially recognized as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. But in many places, the Brotherhood took on an air of respectability. Most notably, Mohamed Morsi, whose party was affiliated with the Brotherhood, became the president of Egypt from 2012 through 2013. The “growth from the bottom” idea of Al-Banna had achieved success—at least for a little time.
Morsi was quickly ousted by the current regime, and the Brotherhood was oppressed once more. But they had shown that the strategy worked.

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